Popomo Farm Report

Railroad, PA ? I spent this summer sitting on the toilet, converting to Rastafarianism, growing tomatoes and elucidating Baudrillard. That leaves precious little time for country music criticism.

And yet each day the mailman brings me more CDs. Even shelving these items, not to speak of listening to them, would be onerous. Besides, I've spent the whole time listening to Augustus Pablo and Count Ossie, while reasoning with the breddrin about the divinity of Haile Selassie I.

Is there a lull in country music right now? Nashville seems unsure of itself. It can't sell records, which might have something to do with the fact that its esthetic is bankrupt. But the alt.country world seems kinda spectral this summer, as if we're in some kinda time warp.

Is it me? Is it the Niyabinghi, the ganja, the precession of simulacra?

Whatever. But the point is that each CD that arrives is a tiny chunk of obligation, and that eventually the pile just buries your famous, brilliant ass. So I'm digging through the muck for the stuff that least sucks.

Perhaps the modern world has become so profoundly alienating that one yearns for a pristine return to 1955, or 1965 or (God help us) 1975. This seems to be the moment at which the best country is the most authentic simulation, in which reality melts into a nostalgic haze, or where only the simulacrum conveys authenticity, and then always in conscious detachment. At any rate, the albums below are pointedly backward-looking and hence contemporary even in the old-time sounds.

The spectacle of an extremely obese, white, Amish Rasta sucking on a huge spliff while listening to the latest wave of Bakersfield-style honkytonk would give many people pause. And yet you've got to admit that there is something perfectly postmodern about my new persona.

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Remember when stupid/ cool brash motherfuckers used to storm up from the South and rock like stupid/cool brash motherfuckers? Well the Hangdogs, no matter where ultimately may be their origins (NYC), show that it's still happening. Something Left to Sell: Live Crap 1995-2001 (Crazyhead) is alive, gritty, nasty, country rock, all of it played and (especially) sung well, though roughly. There's a great version of the George Jones chestnut "White Lightning," for instance, which manages to sound both period and contemporary.

Remember the 70s? It wasn't like The Ice Storm, at least for me, growing up among the Amish. Country music was undergoing a wave of lushly produced and pseudo-sophisticated songs by the likes of Ronnie Milsap, which harked back to earlier stabs at sophisto by Patsy Cline or Eddy Arnold.

Well, from here those old Milsap recordings sound great. Even their sophistication?or precisely their sophistication?is charming in its naivete, charming because it struggles so hard not to be rural and still fails. Maybe today's pop arrangements out of Nashville will age with that kind of grace, though I doubt it.

Anyway, the sound of Nashville circa 1975 is now ripe to be mined as an alternative. And the best person doing it is Mike Ireland, as he demonstrates on Try Again (Ashmont). The string and other arrangements and the songs themselves are Milsapesque. But the sound is also self-aware and a conscious revival. And the singing, which is very plain and clear, is actually an homage to even deeper traditions.

Pam Tillis' album of songs written by her father Mel reminds us of a couple things. It reminds us, first of all, what a great writer Mel is. Certainly, country music, a style notable for amazing writers, can't sport anyone who can write in as many styles. From Patsy-style pop to swing, rowdy rockers to humorous novelty songs. Every tune on It's All Relative: Tillis Sings Tillis (Sony) is a classic: "Detroit City," "Burning Memories," "Mental Revenge."

And the album reminds us, too, what a great singer Pam is. Her first couple of albums, 1991's Put Yourself in My Place and '92's Homeward Looking Angel, were classics. Since then it's been patchy at best. And that made it possible to lose track of the fact that Pam had a perfect nasal twang, that she could sing a country song better than any of her contemporaries with the possible exception of Patty Loveless.

Evidently, the Dad project relieved her of the necessity to try to compromise with Nashville's commercial exigencies, and let her just sing the hell out of a variety of wonderful songs in the central country traditions, with appearances by Dolly Parton, Ray Benson and Mel himself.

And even though many of the arrangements directly reprise the original versions, Pam has the confidence never to descend to mere simulation: whatever the instruments are doing, Pam is doing her thing, which refers to the tradition, but engages it from now. A lot of singers (Mandy Barnett, for example) just try to do Patsy Cline. But Pam sings her dad's Patsy standard "So Wrong" simultaneously as Patsy and herself, which makes you see that Pam is a worthy inheritor of the Patsy tradition.

As everybody seems to know, the Dixie Chicks are the hope of country music: backward-looking but progressive, trad but commercial, hip but not too hip. They seem to have been absent a while, but here is Home (Open Wide). Basically acoustic, the album shows a sudden maturation, with Natalie Maines' vocals showing a mellowing from fun to beautiful.

Too slow to be a bluegrass album, Home has songs by Radney Foster, Bruce Robison, Patty Griffin, Marty Stuart. The songs are pretty strong. But the performances are stronger, and the Chicks, though they recorded this in Texas, have enough leverage to make Nashville remember, and move.

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Perhaps the anthem of postmodern country should be Hillbilly Idol's "No Time Like the Past." The song is credited to band member Al Moss. So why do I feel like I first heard it in 1966? I don't know, but Hillbilly Idol (Slewfoot) is a great, great album. When I played "Hillbilly Polka" for my teenage boys, the screams of anguish confirmed me in my assessment.

Every song on the CD seems to emerge straight out of 1955. So does that mean that these folks come out of art school? Anyway, if you don't like this album, you don't like country music.

On the other hand, the new Tom Armstrong, Songs That Make the Jukebox Play (Carswell), could provide the image for pomo country. Good. It looks like a Faron Young album circa mid-60s. And sounds like one too. In fact, I swear to God this is beyond pomo. There's not a hint of irony, just an absolutely straight reading of the honkytonk tradition.

No doubt the cover is kitschy. But the music itself is so kitschy that it's not kitschy at all: just absolutely true. I think the stage after pomo might return us to simple authenticity, wherein self-consciousness becomes so intense that it makes itself impossible and emerges into pristinity.

I'm not sure how or why you write songs like this anymore, but Tom does, and actually I am listening. In fact, I'm immersed. I'm basting in the past like a warm human stew. Don't you wish you could write metaphors like that? Christ I'm good.

But stoned or not, I really am listening and I'm loving that which I'm listening to. All the songs are originals, and all are in a time warp that is entered into with such sincerity and ability that the intervening years evaporate like a postmodern haze and you emerge into your own past. It's like going back to the old home place and realizing that Mom is still 29. And then marrying your mom and living happily after, raising your kids who are also your nieces and nephews. "I don't care where you get hungry, as long as you eat at home."

Roger Wallace is less pointedly engaged in the nostalgia: he's a "neo-traditionalist" from Texas, just playing great honkytonk. He's got a big old voice a la Tracy Byrd, but with more connection to the past.

I don't like The Lowdown (Lone Star) quite as much as Wallace's previous Hillbilly Heights, mainly because I don't think the songwriting is quite as strong. But still. You know, eventually Nashville will come around to Roger; it's the only hope. Eventually, Nashville will appropriate the Americana format and give up on its simulation of contemporary values.

If they'd just put Wallace's duet with Toni Price on "Blow Wind Blow" on pop country radio, everything would be okay again. Certainly, if there's that Bakersfield thing happening with Armstrong, Wallace is all Texas: complete with twin fiddles and melodies that send you into an involuntary two-step. Texas itself is, I suppose, a pomo state, and even as it shrinks it reappropriates itself in a continual prevision of the past as future, a regime of Foucauldian appearances, a discipline of "authenticity."

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"The Domino Kings thanks God and the United States of America." Is that "serious"? The point is that we've reached the stage at which the answer to that question is not significant, at which sincerity and irony are exactly the same thing, where fiction is true, and truth fictional, and thus truth is true and fiction fictional.

Anyway, The Back of Your Mind (Slewfoot) is rockin' postpostmodern honkytonk in which quotations from "Daytripper" collide with pedal steel guitars in The United States of America, or perhaps "The United States of America," a nation that is at "war." "I'll cry till I learn just to be me." "Every day is another dead end: the places you've seen and people you've been."

One thing you got to say for the popo era: there's something for everyone. Thank God, or "God," or Jah Ras Tafari, for niche marketing. One might think that the niche of white Rastas in rural PA is pretty small, and even underserved. And yet here comes Rosine, a roots country/roots reggae act that hits the head like the sweet mellow buzz from an Amish spliff, especially on the best songs on A New Broom Sweeps Clean, But an Old Broom Knows Every Corner (Rag and Bone Shop), such as the opener, "Wheel and Come Again."

Back in 1925, when Marcus Garvey was listening to the Carter Family and prophesying the end of the world for July 7, 1977, he figured without the redemption of Jah. For Haile knew of the advent of country dub, and that the world must be preserved long enough to see it come to fruition.

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